Showing results by narrator "Natasha Soudek" in All Categories

When Dani Sango’s art forger father passes away, Dani inherits his home. Among his effects is a book of Native American drawings, which leads her to seek the help of museum curator Brad Osgood to decipher the ledger art. Why would her father have this book? Is it just another forgery? Brad Osgood’s four-year-old niece, Brynn, needs a safe home, and Brad longs to provide it. The last thing he needs is more drama, especially from a forger’s daughter. But when the two meet “accidentally” at St. Augustine’s 350-year-old Spanish fort, Castillo de San Marcos, he can’t refuse the intriguing woman.

“One of Mexico’s greatest living writers,” wrote Jonathan Lethem in 2018, “we are just barely beginning to catch up to what she has to offer.” In the years since, Rivera Garza’s work has received widespread recognition: she was awarded a MacArthur Genius Grant for fiction and was a finalist for the 2020 National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism. Yet we have still only started to discover the full range of a writer who is at once an incisive voice on migration, borders, and violence against women, as well as a high stylist in the manner of Lispector or Duras.

Apprentice Flick remembers everything, except the first five years of her life. And for as long as she can remember, Flick has wanted to enter the Elite Academy - home to the best, brightest, and most loyal members of the Love Collective government. Flick's uncanny memory might get her there, too...even if it is the very thing that marks her as a freak. But frightening hallucinations start intruding into her days and threaten to bring down all she has worked so hard to accomplish.

1954: In South East Asia, Cade Martin, hero of the Midnight Front during World War II, chases ghosts and flees his past. In the United States, Briet Segfrunsdóttir heads the Pentagon’s top-secret magickal warfare program. And in South America, Anja Kernova hunts fugitive Nazi sorcerers with the help of a powerful magickal tome known as the Iron Codex. In an ever-more dangerous world, a chance encounter sparks an international race to find Anja and steal the Iron Codex.

Prudence Landon has always done exactly as she should. She's obeyed her parents' every word, lived by society's every dictate, and even agreed to marry a man more than twice her age simply because it was expected of her. In the fortnight before her wedding, she decides it's high time to bend a few rules before life as she knows it is over. Viscount Ashby leads a charmed life. Betrothed since the age of seven, he is perfectly content to allow his off-the-market status to keep the marriage-minded mamas at bay.

After decades of the Cold War and renewed tensions, in the wake of Russian meddling in the 2016 election, cooperation between the United States and Russia seems impossible to imagine - and yet, as Douglas Smith reveals, it has a forgotten but astonishing historical precedent. In 1921, facing one of the worst famines in history, the new Soviet government under Vladimir Lenin invited the American Relief Administration, Herbert Hoover’s brainchild, to save communist Russia from ruin.

As the niece of an earl, Elizabeth Abbington knows all about the stifling expectations and responsibilities placed upon peers of the realm. She has no desire to marry into that kind of life. Instead she dreams of traveling abroad, where she can put her talent for languages to good use. When her dear friend invites her on a trip to Spain, Libby jumps at the chance to begin her adventure.

Holding on is all fourteen-year-old Stephanie Clare Smith can do when she's left home alone in New Orleans during the summer of 1973. As she seeks to ease her solitude through her summer school algebra class, her wandering in the city, and her friendship with a streetcar operator, adults—particularly men—fail her again and again, with devastating consequences.

Award-winning journalist Caitlin Bergman's mother is dead - at least that's what she’s told everyone for the past 40 years. It’s easier to lie than to explain how Maya abandoned her only daughter before dropping off the map forever. But when a rural sheriff invites Caitlin to the woods of coastal Oregon to identify her mother's remains, Caitlin drops everything to face the woman she's spent a lifetime hating. Unfortunately, the body - abandoned on the land of a reclusive cult, the Daughters of God - was left faceless.

Apprentice Flick thought the Elite Academy was the answer to all her problems. But the revelation of her past turned everything upside down. Now, she is caught between two worlds set on a collision course. Will she embrace the chaotic memories that flood her every waking moment? Or will she run to the security of her Elite training?

In Aspen, Colorado, in 1941, Rachel Brewster is a slalom skier at the National Downhill and Slalom Championships. Little Ray, as she is called, finishes nowhere near the podium, but she manages to get pregnant. Back home, in New England, Little Ray becomes a ski instructor. Her son, Adam, grows up in a family that defies conventions and evades questions concerning the eventful past. Years later, looking for answers, Adam will go to Aspen. In the Hotel Jerome, where he was conceived, Adam will meet some ghosts.

Love is an extravagance Darcy Williams can't afford. She prefers the simple life, which includes waitressing at The Love Shack and avoiding temptation. But when a forbidden part of her past steps off the ferry, her safe, guarded existence is turned upside down. Kincaid Foster has never gotten over his first love. When he sees the wild, beautiful blonde again, dancing her way around The Love Shack, the memories of Darcy's soft skin, gentle touch, and heated kisses come rushing back.

Three years have passed since the devastation of Golyna. Anna, once the maker of immortals, continues to fight the evil she unwillingly created through her rune-carving magic. Secreted away in an isolated mountain monastery, she works as a teacher to young scribes, guiding them toward runes that foster peace rather than endless war. So when the tracker who murdered her brother comes to Anna’s redoubt, begging for his eternal runes to be undone, Anna agrees to grant his wish on one condition - that he aid her in rooting out the remnants of Volna, a genocidal regime....

Waitress Jillian Matheson needs a life makeover. The first thing on her "Get it Together" to-do list is breaking up with her fiancé, Zach Gifford, a struggling rocker who refuses to grow up. With Zach on the sidelines, Jillian pursues the dream career she's secretly craved for decades and finds romance in the arms of a hot, mysterious visitor on Fortune's Island. There's just one kink in her plans. Zach's band has a regular gig at The Love Shack where she works. And she can't deny the effect of his velvet-cloaked voice.

A man travels to his son's school to deal with the fallout of a violent attack and to make sure his son will not lose his college place. But what exactly has his son done? And who is to blame? A young woman trying to make it in LA, working in a clothes shop while taking acting classes, turns to a riskier way of making money but will be forced to confront the danger of the game she's playing. And a family coming together for Christmas struggle to skate over the lingering darkness caused by the very ordinary brutality of a troubled husband and father.

Midnight, June 13, 1942: Peter Burger stands on a foggy beach, ears primed as a submarine hull scrapes the sandy sea bottom. He has endured seventeen months in a Gestapo prison and seventeen days on a Nazi U-boat only to have landed on American shores with six boxes of explosives and no escape. After slipping into New York City, Peter finds himself at a massive military parade where he meets Grete Baum, a German-Jewish refugee grappling with loneliness and loss. Grete is drawn to Peter’s brooding vulnerability, and the pair instantly bond.

It is 1940. For the past decade, Walter Benjamin - the German-Jewish critic and philosopher - has been writing his masterpiece in a library in Paris, a city he loves. Now Nazi tanks have overrun the suburbs, and Benjamin is forced to flee. With a battered briefcase that contains his precious manuscript of a thousand handwritten pages, he sets off for the border and is led by chance to a young anti-Nazi who is taking Jews and other refugees over the Pyrenees into Spain, where they may (with luck) make their way to freedom in Portugal or South America.

Fifteen years ago, Hector Lewis’ wife and young daughter vanished without a trace. People have long thought he was responsible, but the man he knows is behind their disappearance still walks free. As a police officer, he is sworn to uphold the law. But he has seen how little justice there is in the world. And when a newcomer’s arrival sparks a harrowing series of crimes, Hector finds himself in a race to catch a man he is convinced is a killer.

It is the Saturday after the 2016 presidential election, and in a plush weekend house in Connecticut, an intimate group of friends, New Yorkers all, has gathered to recover from what they consider the greatest political catastrophe of their lives. They have just sat down to tea when their hostess, Eva Lindquist, proposes a dare. Who among them would be willing to ask Siri how to assassinate Donald Trump?

Nan and Heath Duncan, siblings abandoned by their papa and abused by their guardian, have no choice but to survive on the London streets. When a kind gentleman rescues Nan from such a life, the siblings are separated and raised in two vastly different social worlds. Just when both are beginning to flourish and years have healed some of their wounds, their long-awaited papa returns and reunites them—bringing demands with him. Nan is expected to marry a rich suitor she's never liked, and Heath is expected to forsake his gentle spirit and become the hardened man his father always was.